Costa Rica swallowed a tough pill Saturday night as the men's national soccer team, affectionately called La Sele, lost 0-1 to Uruguay, making it nearly impossible for them to qualify for the World Cup.

The game was the first of two matches Costa Rica must play against “los charrúas” – the Uruguayan national team. Only one of the teams will go on to play in the World Cup in South Africa next summer.

Both Costa Rica and Uruguay failed to qualify during the initial qualifying rounds, and are playing off for the last spot in the Americas. Costa Rica, which competes in the North and Central American region known as CONCACAF, came in fourth place at the end of the general qualifying round. Uruguay, which competes in South America's CONMEBOL region, finished in fifth place.

The final match is scheduled for Wednesday and will be an uphill battle for the Ticos, as it will take place on Uruguayan turf, a notoriously difficult pitch. La Sele must win in order to have a chance at competing in South Africa next year.

Uruguayan head coach, Oscar “Washington” Tabárez, said after the game, “With all due respect, Costa Rica will need to accomplish a rare feat.” And he's right: Uruguay lost only two out of nine home games during World Cup qualifying.

Perhaps making the challenge even more difficult is the fact that Uruguay did not qualify for the Germany World Cup in 2006. On Wednesday, they will be hungrier than ever.

While there is no doubt the Ticos will need nothing short of a brilliant performance next Wednesday, there's still a chance La Sele can come out on top. Costa Rica created a few dangerous attacking opportunities in the second half, even with a man down.

Randall Azofeifa, a Costa Rican midfielder, was ejected from the game on Saturday, when he received his second yellow card in the 51st minute of play. After the Uruguayan goal in the 21st minute, the game remained scoreless.

The game on Wednesday begins at 5 p.m. (local time) at the Centenario Stadium in Montevideo.

A landslide in San Vito de Coto Brus in Costa Rica's Southern Zone killed a 15-year-old high school student on Friday afternoon.

The landslide occurred as a 5.1 magnitude earthquake shook much of Costa Rica's Central Valley and Southern Zone at 3:20 p.m. Friday. Local firefighters and the National Police reported the landslide at 4:30. Shortly after, officials announced that it had caused the death of Yuliana Sandoval.

Authorities believe that heavy rainfall in the area and Friday's shakes are the principal causes of the landslip.

The debris from the landslide covered more than 100 meters of ground and forced the closure of the highway in San Vito de Coto Brus. On Saturday, crews were working to clear the roadway.

According to the National University's Volcanological and Seismological Observatory (OVSICORI), the epicenter of Friday afternoon's quake was 20 kilometers northeast of Parrita, a farming town near the Pacific coast southwest of San José.

OVSICORI reported that the earthquake struck along the Sierra Brunqueña fault line at a depth of 19 kilometers. The fault connects Quepos and Puriscal.

The quake was felt in San José, Heredia and Alajuela in the Central Valley, Jacó on the Pacific coast and Guácimo in Limón, on the Caribbean slope, according to posts by users of the online social network site Twitter.

The U.S. Geological Survey recorded the movement at 38 km deep with a magnitude of 5.0.

No other injuries or major damage were reported.

Dr. Innovation: Costa Rican Dr. Pablo Ortiz is spearheading an award-winning public health program with Panamanian indigenous families in the southern region of Coto Brus.

Alex Leff | Tico Times

GUATEMALA CITY – Brazilian corruption busters, a “comfort-food” startup by California-based Mexicans and a Costa Rican doctor who treats Panamanian indigenous people won the top three awards Friday at the Fifth Social Innovation Fair at this Central American capital's San Carlos University.

The winners – earning $30,000, $20,000 and $15,000 respectively from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation – demonstrated to the United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) that their projects are highly innovative, sustainable, cost efficient, replicable and have made the greatest impact of the 13 programs presented, said Nohra Rey, spokeswoman for the ECLAC committee of judges.

This year's finalists included Costa Rica's first-ever participant among approximately 4,800 social development programs from countries across Latin America and the Caribbean that have been presented in the five editions of the fair.

Costa Rica's Integral Health Care for the Highly Mobile Indigenous Population is a “pioneer initiative,” ECLAC said, in that it is a publicly funded project that attends to a group whose medical needs were previously unmet. Most other projects in the fair are grassroots, community-based efforts or initiatives of nongovernmental organizations.

Spearheaded by Dr. Pablo Ortiz and based in the Southern Zone canton of Coto Brus, the project is designed to help the Ngöbe community that travels back and forth each year from Panama to this Costa Rican coffee growing region. The migrant population has tripled in the past four years, reaching 13,600 for the 2008 coffee harvest, Dr. Ortiz told The Tico Times.

He said his project has helped almost halve the region's infant mortality rate – once among the country's highest – from 17.2 deaths per thousand live births in 2001 to 9.2 in 2007.

Dr. Otriz said illness and emergency treatment also have decreased dramatically since the inception of the project, which includes greater preventive care and health education. He said the program not only can be applied in other regions of Costa Rica, but can be easily replicated in other countries as well.

This year's top winner at the fair in Guatemala was the Social Observatory of Maringá, a grassroots, nonpartisan organization that supervises public spending by southern Brazil's Maringá Municipality. Second place went to the Bi-National Remittances Investment project, which has enabled a community in southern Mexico's Oaxaca to reinvest money sent down from family members working in the United States into a company that produces “nostalgic food” for migrant workers.

See the Nov. 20 print or digital edition of The Tico Times for more on this story.

The biggest players in the coffee world met in Guanacaste this weekend for the 23rd annual Sintercafé conference. The three-day event, which was held at the Paradiso Hotel in Conchal on the northern Pacific coast, discussed all aspects of the state of the worldwide coffee industry, including the effects of the global economic crisis on the market, the perceived effects of the El Niño weather system and the continued push toward industry-wide sustainable producing practices.

Sintercafé, which took place in Guanacaste after 22 straight years in San José, brought together some of the biggest producers, sellers and buyers, as well as regulators of coffee trade and production standards. Among the attendees were Dub Hay, the senior vice president of Coffee Global Procurement for Starbucks, Paul Rice, president and CEO of Transfair USA – which promotes fair trade coffee practices, and Nestor Osorio, the executive director of the International Coffee Organization, which monitors and creates standards for coffee production, pricing and distribution. Representatives from the biggest coffee producing and consuming countries in the world were among the over 100 coffee industry members on hand to discuss the ups and downs of the industry over the past year, the expectations for the coming year and to enjoy three days of recreational activities in the Guanacaste region.

“This is such a great event in that we come together and talk about the progress of our industry, and then get the chance to enjoy a beautiful part of the country,” said Rice, who started his coffee career working with farmers in Nicaragua. “The people here are committed to the same ideals of doing the entire process right – from the creation to the consumer. There is a common interest in integrity among the leaders of the coffee industry.”

On Friday afternoon, Sintercafé organized a tour of the Coope Pilangosta coffee plantation in the town of Hojancha, in northern Guanacaste. During the tour, guide Byron Pérez and General Manager Dimas Rojas demonstrated the life cycle of a coffee bean; from planting, to picking, to drying and roasting, to bagging and shipment.

According to Pérez, the coffee harvest season in Costa Rica runs from October to January each year, though this year, the harvest is running particularly late to a lack of rain.

“We just started the harvest about two weeks ago, at the very end of October,” said Pérez, who has worked at Coope Pilangosta for more than three years. “There wasn't enough rain at the beginning of the month to begin the harvest when we usually do, so we started almost a month late. We are not sure how the late start will affect the harvest, but we are starting much later than a typical year.”

See the Nov. 20 print or digital edition of The Tico Times for more on this story.